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Present Moment (present + moment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Critical Pedagogy for the Present Moment: Learning from the Avant-Garde to Teach Globalization from Experiences

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 3 2003
André C. Drainville
Closer to us in what it integrates and in its consequences, global politics still gets conceptualized as if it belonged to a realm of its own, disembedded and abstracted beyond quotidian experiences of power. Still folded in a supernatural world that cannot be of their making, as far from experience as their cold war predecessors were, international studies (IS) students are as alienated and find it as hard to work with critical imagination. To teach students to be more than mere technicians of whatever new world order may be born of present circumstances, we have to unmake the political separation that still exists between the study and teaching of global politics and everyday life in the world economy. This article presents a record of a decade-long teaching experiment conducted in the department of political science at Laval University in Québec City. Borrowing techniques and inspiration from the "historical avant-garde," I have worked to reinvent my pedagogical practice to create "situations" in which students can be full, unalienated subjects in the learning process. [source]

Something ,Paralogical' Under the Sun: Lyotard's Postmodern Condition and science education

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2000
Michalinos ZembylasArticle first published online: 2 NOV 200
Sometimes I dream that I am an astronaut. I land my spaceship on a distant planet. When I tell me children on that planet that on earth school is compulsory and that we have homework every evening, they split their sides laughing. And so I decide to stay with them for a long, long time, Well anyway, until the summer holidays. (Cited in Lyotard, 1995, p. xix) Each state of the mind is irreducible. The mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it. From all this, it would be possible to deduce that there is no science in Tlon, let alone rational thought. The paradox, however, is that sciences exist, in countless number, The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to some one of them. Even the phrase ,all the aspects' can be rejected, since it presupposes the impossible inclusion of the present moment, and of past moments. (Borges, 1962, p. 10) [source]

Mindfulness as a means of reducing aggressive behavior: dispositional and situational evidence

AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, Issue 5 2008
Whitney L. Heppner
Abstract Recent research and theory suggest that mindfulness, or enhanced attention and awareness in the present moment [Brown and Ryan, 2003], may be linked to lower levels of ego-involvement and, as a result, may have implications for lowering hostility and aggressive behavior. Accordingly, we conducted two studies to examine the potential aggression-mitigating role of mindfulness. In Study 1, we found that dispositional mindfulness correlated negatively with self-reported aggressiveness and hostile attribution bias. In Study 2, participants made mindful before receiving social rejection feedback displayed less-aggressive behavior than did rejected participants not made mindful. Discussion centers on potential mechanisms by which mindfulness operates to reduce aggressive behavior. Aggr. Behav. 34:486,496, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2001
Robert Rotenberg
In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth-century movement of "metropolitanism" was a transnational attempt to rebuild and re-imagine cities in a bourgeois image and through a capitalist process of investment. This movement began with the attempt by wealthy residents of imperial metropoles to remake their cities in ways that created greater social distance between themselves and their colonies,both external and internal. I explore how a discourse with specific urban content can engender a movement that revolutionizes people's view of the city. The analysis points toward a revitalization of this movement in the present moment of global transformations, suggesting that the reshaping of urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes is not new. [urban, metropolitanism, colonialism, housing, architecture] [source]